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Each week during our fall pledge campaign [Sep 30-Nov 18] I reflect on a different aspect of love, guided by Scripture and quotations from literature or from prominent figures in history.
We say that with love (God) all things are possible. We say that church should be considered a school for learning how to love. But how exactly is love taught at church? There are numerous answers but chief among them is the liturgy—the form and the words we engage on Sunday morning to worship God. On Sunday, September 30th, my senses heightened from our fall pledge campaign focus on love, I noticed for the first time all the places in our worship service where the word “love” appears.
As Episcopalians, our liturgy (a fixed form of worship) contains our principal doctrinal statements. “The tag lex orandi, lex credenda, which could be translated roughly as ‘the way you pray determines what you believe,’ expresses the fact that theology and worship interact with each other.” [1] So when we speak of love in worship we learn about love, subtle as those learnings may seem. And when you consider that we speak and learn of love week after week, month after month, and year after year, we are in fact being shaped just as steady drops of water over time shape a stone.
The first place we speak of love in the Sunday liturgy is in the Collect for Purity, a prayer at least as old as the 11th century, and rooted in the language of Psalm 51. [2] In this prayer we acknowledge that God knows every thought that springs from our hearts, and we ask God to use the Holy Spirit to cleanse those thoughts so that we might perfectly love God. I think of the Spirit as a great metaphysical push-broom on a concrete garage floor, moving out dead leaves, road mud, dog hair and so on, cleaning us of everything that is not love. To love God perfectly may not mean to love God flawlessly, for who among us can achieve that? Rather, the goal is love God as fully and completely as we are able, free of all the clutter.
In the Confession of Sin (a relative “youngster”, having only been said in unison by the congregation since 1662) [3] we tell God that we have failed to love him with our “whole heart” and we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. Every time we say this confession, we are carried back to the words commonly called “The Great Commandment”: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These words can be found in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. [4] The words of the Confession of Sin reorient our moral compass each time we say them, reminding us that love is at the core of the Christian life.
The presider of the liturgy is free to choose from among a number of sentences of Scripture at The Offertory, to offer a prayer suitable to the occasion, or to say nothing at all. At St John’s, we tend to default to words drawn from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (5:2): “Walk in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.” As Jesus offered himself and his vital aliveness to God, we too are asked at The Offertory to give something of our own vital resources—namely, our money—to God, in emulation of Jesus. We learn that love means giving of ourselves—giving of who we are and what we have.
Of the Eucharist Prayers, we typically use at St John’s, prayers A, B, and D all say something about love. Prayer-A, which is a modern adaptation (written by a seminary professor) [5] of a prayer from earlier American prayer books says: “Holy and Gracious Father: In your infinite love you made us for yourself.” From this, we learn that God’s love is infinite—boundless and never-ending—and that out of that fantastic love outpouring we came into being. Furthermore, we came into being as God’s own, for God’s own purposes and delight. Imagine what a world we might help create if we invited people to consider that their highest calling in life is not solely to produce, amass, or accomplish, but to delight God.
In Prayer B, rooted in the worship of the 3rd-century Roman theologian Hippolytus, and modernized by one of our former presiding bishops [6], we thank God for “the goodness and love which [God] has made known to us in creation.” It is fascinating to consider the created order as a school for learning love. Think of the beneficial interplay between soil microbes and plants, the cooperation between mosses and tree bark, and the symbiotic relationships between disparate species. Scientists call one form of this symbiotic relationship “mutualism”, wherein both species benefit from the interaction. They offer the example of the Egyptian Plover and the crocodile. The crocodile feeds on meat. Bits of meat get stuck in the crocodile’s teeth and rot. Unaddressed, the rot leads to tooth decay. Without workable teeth, the crocodile cannot feed itself. The plover flies to the crocodile, which opens its mouth—not to snap shut around the bird, but to permit the bird to remove and feed on the bits of rotting matter like an avian dentist. Both species win. [7] One aspect of love revealed in creation then, is helpfulness. Prayer D, which originates in the 4th century [8] echoes this, saying of God, “Your mighty works reveal your wisdom and love.”
The Post-Communion Prayer—aka “the prayer of thanksgiving”—hearkens back to the Collect for Purity which opened the liturgy. In the Post-Communion Prayer, we ask God to “send us now into the world in peace and grant us strength and courage to love and serve [God] with gladness and singleness of heart.” From this we learn that our place is out in the world, serving God gladly and with focused intention. We learn that strength and courage are gifts from God—gifts available to us for the asking, and we learn that love and service are inextricably bound together. The Dismissal we most often use at St John’s—“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord”—underscores this.
Scottish poet Alexander Smith (1829-1867) wrote: “Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.” [9] In liturgy—by the grace of the Holy Spirit—we discover ourselves in God.
[1] Christian Theology: An Introduction, Alistair E. McGrath, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, 140.
[2] Commentary on the American Prayer Book, Marion J. Hatchett, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, 318
[3] Hatchett, 343
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Commandment
[5] Hatchett, 374
[6] Hatchett, 375
[7] https://www.factmonster.com/science/animals/animal-partnerships
[8] Hatchett, 377
[9] https://www.azquotes.com/author/13736-Alexander_Smith and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Smith_(poet)
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